The first time I laid my eyes on that pamphlet, turned slightly yellow from its age, I was intrigued by the image of a leafless apple tree. It was no ordinary tree, but the first apple tree ever grown on the Pacific Coast and it was right here in Oregon City; not far from where I stood. The tree stood on the yard of the first ever protestant church built in North America, west of the Rockies. That’s a couple of firsts.

There’re times when an out-of-the-box solution for access log is not enough and one has to customize the logging output for various reasons, including security. Recently, I had to redact a part of the request URL for requests matching certain. In the request log example shown in Figure 1, the word rosemont in the URL had to be substituted with the word REDACTED.

Before the dawn of containerization, it was relatively easy to debug the network traffic of an application running on a regular server. One can easily run an instance of Wireshark to capture network packets or execute tcpdump utility (a command-line packet analyzer) on a server. The PCAP file generated by tcpdump can later be analyzed with Wireshark.

I keep on running into interesting problems while migrating applications into our Kubernetes(k8s) environment. Recently, a Spring Boot based application started returning invalid characters once it was ported to k8s. Instead of returning a ό, it returned with a set of garbage characters.

I got a call from my friend, a few Sundays back, and he started asking me about bitcoin and mining. Though I had a vague notion of bitcoins and the technology behind it, I wasn’t familiar with all the terms. As you’ve probably guessed, I wasn’t able to carry out any meaningful discussion on the bitcoin topic. This post is my first attempt at making sense of blockchain, the technology at the heart of digital currency.